Step 8: Bonus: Grabatar Customization

Portals is a prototype of a tangible and networked system/interface for interacting with a virtual world.

A portal, according to Wikipedia, is a magical or technological doorway that connects two distant locations separated by spacetime. Places that a portal will link to include a different spot in the same universe, a parallel world, the past or the future, and other planes of existence.

There are basically 3 main features of these specific portals:

1. To interact with the portal, you reach inside the box, going behind the screen instead of gesturing in front of it or touching it.

2. The two portals are networked so you can collaboratively play with someone in a shared space, even if they're physically far away.

3. The system recognizes and responds when special objects are inside, tracking the id, position, and rotation.

Videos
It makes more sense when you see it in action, so here's an edited version of a longer scenario video I made for the project which just highlights the main features.

Also, a short video of the Portals in action at 4 Hours Solid, my grad show:

The project was created in 2011-12 as part of an MFA Thesis in Graduate Media Design, at Art Center College of Design. If you want more details about the project visit Portals (and friends). One of my main goals of the project was to create something that other people could build upon and expand. So.... without further ado, let's get on to the How To part of things!

Note: my process of building these boxes wasn’t this straight forward. It was a super iterative process that involved lots of small tests. Even though I’m going to try to explain it in a more logical step based way, I would still recommend testing out parts of the hardware + software before diving in and building the entire thing for real.

“The visible world is no longer a reality and the unseen world is no longer a dream.”-Arthur Symons

I suppose you could use something other than a Mac, most of the software works on Mac or Windows.

CamTwist, which is what sort of makes the magic happen is for Mac only. There are other similar programs out there for Windows but I don't know which ones would work best since I haven't tested for it. But let me know if you find a good one!

I like to make this project for my own. but the software's is the problem, all of it need to use mac operation.. is there any software's that can be use for window or Linux.... please help me please. i already buy the components.